The Planet on its Side
by PrairieDawn
Summary: On a planet with extreme seasons, the Doctor and his companion must lead a research team on a hazardous journey. An Alex story.
1. Chapter 1

Author's Notes: As per usual: This story occurs after the events in Voyage of the Damned in the Doctor's timeline and after the events in The Elephant in the Room in Alex's timeline.

Warnings: Gratuitous prairie goggling, gratuitous technobabble, little girls

Doctor Who belongs to the Beeb. Don't sue me :)

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The Doctor peered into the laptop screen attached to the TARDIS console, his lips pursed thoughtfully. "Doctor?" Alex said quietly, not wanting to break his concentration if he were doing something important. "You're not watching lolcats on YouTube again, are you?"

"You should never have gotten me started on those," he admonished with a sly grin, "but no, not this time. Are you done with your work?"

Alex made a disgusted face. "My new online account had me doing math and English placement testing all morning." Her online access had been stuck on the day she had left Earth with the Doctor. She had been dutifully logging on to her online school account every day to keep up with her work until yesterday, when it had denied her access with a prim notice that she was not to share her account with other people. Apparently she'd used up all of the hours in that day and had started crossing her own timeline. Unfortunately, the Doctor had solved the problem for her by creating a new account that logged her in under an alias in 2006 and ratcheted forward a day every time she logged on. "You owe me a weird planet."

He grinned. "One weird planet, coming up! Strap yourself into the jumpseat, would you?"

She hopped up onto the battered yellow jumpseat and strapped herself in. "Where are we going?""

"Field trip. Like I said, we'll do science and history in the afternoons. Can't have you relying on that 21st century Earth curriculum, half of it's flat wrong."

"At least it's only half wrong," she said.

The Doctor ran around the console, manipulating buttons, dials, and switches in a manner that looked entirely random to Alex, talking all the while. "Temporal physics, all wrong, particle physics, mostly wrong, and they don't discuss quantum observer bias at all! How can you interpret experimental results without a handle on QOB, tell me that? Relevant to you, that is, Alex, but more about that later, and here we go!" He punched one more button to punctuate his speech, and the floor dropped out from under Alex.

There was one hard lurch to the side, some bit of technological debris clattered across the floor to lodge in a corner, and then the TARDIS wheezed, shuddered, and parked itself. Alex swallowed and wondered just how long it would be before her stomach would get used to time travel vertigo. "Now, this is a weird planet," the Doctor said. "Bring your pack, we're going to do a bit of astronomy."

She unstrapped herself and climbed gingerly out of the chair, then stood a moment with her hands braced on her knees until the room stopped spinning. She jogged back to her room for her backpack and checked to be sure that the electronic notebook was inside. With a locator beacon keyed to the doctor's sonic screwdriver, dimensional pockets big enough to hold a complete change of clothes, and a waterproof, mostly fireproof (don't throw it in a volcano to test it, Alex) particle screen, the pack was her new favorite possession. She could chuck it in the ocean and her belongings would be safe.

The Doctor opened the door on a world with a deep blue sky laced with diaphanous pink and gold clouds, an Earth sky with a late afternoon patina, she thought, but she stepped out of the Tardis onto rich red and purple ground cover that was almost, but not quite grass. A surprisingly brisk wind whipped her hair into her eyes. The vegetation reminded her of shortgrass prairie, a low and windswept patchwork of scrubby plum purple shrubs, rust orange sprays, stiff scarlet stems with long red-gold leaves blowing behind them, and down by her feet, little plants with pink leaves and bright green flowers.

The ground looked like a rough sea caught in a photograph, complete with swells and breakers. It was pitted with craters, some lined with taller plants and shrubs, others, the deepest ones, lined with shallow ponds. "Did meteorites make the craters?" she asked.

"Good guess, but no. They're called kettle holes. They're made by melting glacial ice." He spread a blanket on the ground to sit on and gestured to Alex to join him. "Science is all about paying attention and asking questions. So today I want you to practice paying attention to what's around you. What else do you notice?"

Alex took a seat at the edge of the blanket and pulled a windbreaker that was only a little too big out of her backpack. "No trees." She dug her fingers experimentally into the ground and laced them through the tangled roots and rhizomes near the surface. "Tough vegetation. Reminds me of a prairie, except that the colors are all wrong."

"Not wrong, just uncommon," the Doctor corrected her. He sounded sad all of a sudden. "Only a few chemicals can synthesize sugars from sunlight and simple compounds. The most common are Earth's green chlorophylls and a red pigment similar to carotenoids in Earth plants. The red pigment generally only evolves on planets deficient in magnesium."

"It is pretty," she allowed, "just different." Why do the colors make you sad? She decided to keep that observation to herself. She took one more good look around. There were steps, cut into the side of one of the deeper holes and lined with flat stones. "Somebody made a stairway into that hole. So people must come here."

The Doctor nodded. "Don't just look. Close your eyes. What else can you tell me."

She took a moment to pull on the windbreaker, then concentrated on listening, smelling, feeling. Her hair plastered itself across her cheeks. "It's very windy. Smells damp and sharp, like a thunderstorm. And I'm..." She stood up, leaving her backpack on the blanket to jump up and down on the spongy ground. "I'm heavy!"

"Very good. That's ozone you're smelling, from lightning strikes. Gravity is 1.2 times what you're familiar with on Earth. Take out your notebook."

She sat back down to rummage in her bag, then passed the notebook to the Doctor. He turned on the holographic projector bound into her book. A globe made of light appeared displaying Earth's familiar continents, a red line marking the equator, and a green skewer marking the poles. "Here's Earth." He tapped a couple of keys. "This is Tempest." A new world appeared, with bluegreen water, purple tinged continents, and an enormous icecap on one side. The line girdling this world's equator was nearly straight up and down, while the green skewer of the planet's axis was nearly horizontal. "It has an eighty degree axial tilt," the Doctor commented. "Really crazy seasons." The image zoomed out to show the planet orbiting its parent star. "Summer and winter, one side of the planet faces the star, the other away. The equator is in twilight. In spring and fall, the habitable regions of the planet have twenty-two hour days, with direct sunlight falling on the equator and less light at the poles." As the image of the planet circled the sun, a huge icecap formed on the shadowed pole, then melted and reformed on the opposite side as the planet's orientation changed.

"It's like it has an ice age every year," Alex said.

The Doctor looked off to the left, startled by something. "Ah. You forgot a sense. Close your eyes and try again."

"I assume you don't mean for me to lick anything," she kidded, in part to disguise her discomfort with the new part of herself she was supposed to be figuring out. She rested her chin on her knees, obediently closing her eyes and thinning out her mental shield. "Sorry, must be out of my range...wait...is that smudge people? Like, four, maybe?"

"Five." He closed her notebook and tucked it into her pack, then took a couple of steps in the direction of the as yet unseen beings. She zipped up the bag and stood at the edge of the blanket, tucking her hair behind one ear. Four people came into view on a small rise behind and to the left of the Tardis, human people, or at least, human seeming. No, the Doctor had been right, there were five of them. The younger of the two women had a toddler slung on her back, its fluffy black hair and curious eyes just visible over her shoulder. They were all dressed in heavy pants festooned with pockets and faded long sleeved shirts with embroidery picked out on the collars and sleeves.

"Hoy!" the older woman hailed them, waving her whole arm in an expansive, friendly gesture. Both women approached, half walking, half sliding down the steep incline, while a middle aged man waited at the crest of the hill with a girl Alex's own age. They were all differing shades of caramel, with dark hair cut short in the case of the man and the older woman. The younger woman and the girl wore their hair in braids wound round their heads and bound with tie dyed headscarves.

The Doctor returned the wave. "We're just sightseeing for the day. Hope we're not trespassing."

She smiled warmly and extended a hand for the Doctor to shake. "Lila Donann," she said. "My daughter Mallena, and my grandson Ain." She reached behind her daughter to tousle the baby's hair. "Up the hill, that's my other daughter Carity and my husband Van. You got all that?"

The Doctor nodded. "Think so. I'm the Doctor, and this is Alex. My ward."

His ward. That sounded really funny, but he hadn't wanted to lie unless they had to, which had ruled out her claiming to be a niece. Alex's eyes kept straying up the hill to the other girl, Carity, was it? She hazarded a wave of her own. The other girl returned it.

Lila continued cheerfully, "Where's your ship? You'll want to be moving it. This whole area will be under twenty meters of snow and ice before long."

"That's it." He gestured to the Tardis.

The younger woman, Mallena, gave the Tardis a skeptical once over. "None too aerodynamic, is it?"

"Oi, that's my ship you're insulting there." The Doctor feigned offense, but poorly enough to make it clear that he was joking. He continued in a more friendly tone, "Really, though, I don't fly it much in normal space."

Carity was making her way down the hill to join her mother. Alex stood, brushing leaves off her behind. They each stayed behind their respective adults, peering at each other. Lila continued, "Well you're welcome to come to our place for supper. The settlement's a klick north of here. We're all busy getting ready for the migration. We left it a bit late this year, technical issues, you know." She glanced at Alex, then at Carity. "It's such a small settlement, only half a dozen children, and none near Carity's age."

"Oh, I don't know, I don't do dinner invites," the Doctor said. He spared a glance at Alex. She gave him her very best pleading look. "All right," he said to her, "you want to go, we can go." He turned back to Lila. "Technical issues, you say?"

Lila put him off, pointedly looking at the children. "Later. But you really ought to bring your ship with you. They don't call it winter for nothing, here. Comes overnight, several centimeters of snow an hour until the whole icecap moves to this hemisphere. If it starts tonight, you won't see your ship again until spring."

As if on cue, the wind picked up. Their blanket rolled over, caught a gust, and sailed off down the hill. Alex ran after it awkwardly on the unfamiliar ground, but Carity was faster than she was. She pounced to wrap both arms tight around it, then rolled it into a ball to tuck under one arm. She balanced on another ridge in the rolling ground, walking along it like a balance beam. "You can't leave something like that lying around without a weight on top of it, here," she said.

"I'll try not to forget again." Alex walked back to her backpack, checked her upended notebook for damage, and put it away.

Carity followed her. "Doesn't look much like a spaceship," she commented.

The Doctor overheard them and clarified, "It's a dimensionally transcendent timeship. It's all right, Alex, we're far enough downtime not to be cagey about time travel." Downtime? She made a note to ask about the term later.

"Your Dad, is he a Time Agent, then?" Carity said, lowering her voice a little in the vain hope that the Doctor wouldn't overhear.

Alex shook her head. "I'm not sure. And he's not my Dad."

The Doctor was still chatting with the adults, but he managed to overhear them anyway. He called over his shoulder, "Not a Time Agent, Alex. They're a different thing entirely."

Alex gestured down the hill with her chin. Carity nodded. They took a few more steps down toward one of the kettle holes. Carity picked a handful of brown seed pods the size of acorns and began to toss them down into the hole. Alex picked one up and rolled it between her fingers. The seeds inside rattled faintly. "How long have you lived here?" Alex asked, figuring that was a safe enough question.

Carity kept chucking seeds into the pond at the bottom of the kettle hole. "Four years. We don't get many visitors. My parents are studying the way life adapts to Tempest's seasons. We're trying to delay a terraform. What about you, have you always lived on a timeship?"

Alex shook her head. "I'm from pretty far in your past--uptime I mean. The Doctor picked me up...I don't know, exactly, but I don't think it's been two weeks. You still use weeks?"

"Why wouldn't we?" Carity folded down some tall grasslike plants to sit on and started to rake her fingers through a clump of low, rust colored weeds. "So are you an orphan or something?"

"No. Well I mean, I guess my parents have been dead for thousands of years right now," she said, "but I can go home the day I left as long as I don't cross my own timeline."

"And they just let you go?" Carity picked through the debris in her fingers, separating out a few small, reddish ovals. She popped a couple in her mouth and held out the rest to Alex.

Alex crouched down at the edge of the kettle hole next to Carity. "My mom practically threw me at him." She tipped her hand up to catch the seeds, kicking her shield up a notch at the same time. Their fingers touched, fleetingly, but she only got a little dizzy for a second.

"Um," she said, examining the seeds in her hand. "You are human, right?"

"Yeah. Aren't you?"

"Sure, I just know there are some people who aren't, but look it, and I didn't want to accidently poison myself."

"They won't poison you," Carity said. Alex popped a couple in her mouth. They tasted a little like peanuts and a little like cherries.

Lila beckoned the two of them with a wave. They made their way back up the hill, Carity pausing to shake more sweet seeds out of the low shrubs on the way.

"Can I walk back with Carity while you bring the TARDIS, please?" Alex asked.

To his credit, he did appear to think it through for a moment before saying, "No."

She put on her best cutesy pout face. "I promise I won't get into any trouble."

"I'm sorry, Alex, that's not a promise you can make. Yet." He turned back to the rest of the Donanns. "The two of us will meet you back at the settlement, if you could provide coordinates?" The older man, Van, passed a palm computer to the doctor, who made a pass across it with the ubiquitous sonic screwdriver before returning it. "Ready, then?" He said to Alex.

She decided to try one more tactic. "Could Carity ride with us, then?"

"Oh, could I?" Carity breathed.

The Doctor looked so conflicted that Alex almost wished she hadn't ambushed him. Almost. He pocketed his sonic screwdriver and shook his head slowly, then he smiled. "If her parents are all right with it."

"Of course Carity can ride with you, if you don't mind," Lila said to the Doctor.

"Yes!" both girls shouted in unison. Carity held up her hands in a sort of double high five gesture. Alex paused for a beat, uncertain, then returned the gesture and did not fall down in spite of another brief dizzy spell. She smiled at the Doctor a little smugly.

"Don't get ahead of yourself," he cautioned, then hiked the rest of the way up the hill to where the Tardis rested. Both girls followed. He led the way inside. Alex ran up to the console and turned around to see the look on Carity's face when she figured out she wasn't walking into a tiny closet.

Carity did not look as impressed as Alex had expected. "Well, I had been kind of wondering about the size," Carity said as she caught sight of the spacious interior. "Is it a nested manifold or a delocalization?"

The Doctor grinned. "Closer to the former than the latter, Carity." He called up an animation on the screen attached to the control console. "How much higher dimensional topology have you studied?"

"My mom's the expedition engineer," she said, as if that explained everything. Alex stopped in the control room doorway, watching them get all math geeky. She walked back over to the console screen and watched the warping shapes that were supposed to mean something. Leaving her twenty first century existence might have saved her life---jury was still out on that--but it had not done good things for her impression of her own intelligence.

The Doctor plugged in the coordinates for the Tempest settlement. "Alex, would you press the red button near the center of the panel in front of you and hold it?"

"Sure," she said. "Why?"

He scrubbed at his hair. "It's a steering override. The Tardis doesn't like it when I use it, but it makes sure we go exactly where I intend for us to." At her puzzled expression, he continued, "She has quite the mind of her own, you know."

Carity goggled. "Your ship's alive?" Anything else she might have said and any reply the Doctor might have made were swallowed up in the noise and turbulence of their transit.


	2. Chapter 2

Thanks to Isis the Sphinx and Spring for Beta Reading.

More warnings: The National Weather Service has issued a Severe Winter Storm Warning for this chapter. Please take all necessary precautions. Gratuitous pie, babies, and preteen angst.

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The Planet on its Side, Chapter 2

The TARDIS rematerialized inside a Quonset hut full of scratched and dented small craft. A thin whistling sound permeated the building, punctuated by a sound like distant thunder as the corrugated metal hemisphere that formed the walls and ceiling rattled in the wind. Carity walked out into an open space a little way in front of the TARDIS and cupped a hand to her mouth. "Echo, echo, echo!" she shouted. Her words reverberated around the interior of the large, corrugated metal building for several seconds. "This way," she beckoned to Alex and the Doctor, then ducked around a dented blue and silver ship and out of sight.

The Doctor turned to face her. "Keep your eyes open and don't get lost. It could be nothing, but..."

"But it's not." Alex interrupted.

"Exactly." He started off in the direction Carity had gone.

Alex ran to catch up. "Hey, um, could you maybe not say anything about me and the, you know, thing?" she waved her hand vaguely at her head.

"Don't worry, I won't say anything unless your safety is at stake. Just stay out of trouble." They ducked under the wing of a little flyer and out a door helpfully marked "EXIT."

The wind almost blew them over. Carity and a teenaged boy were waving to them across the space between buildings. Pink fluff and tiny bits of stem and stick, some of it sharp, whipped through air grown much colder even in the few minutes they had been in the TARDIS. Alex turned her head to the south, where clouds too dark for snow made a threatening line on the horizon. When they were almost at the building Carity and the boy stood in front of, the boy shook his head and pointed at a domed building a hundred meters away. Confused, Alex ran in slow motion, hindered by her increased weight and the buffeting wind. The Doctor caught her arm to drag her along.

They reached a clear, low, domed building. "Down the stairs unless you want to learn to fly," the boy shouted over the rattling of the dome. Alex and Carity stumbled down a narrow flight of stairs, followed by the Doctor. The boy stayed behind, holding the door closed with both hands wrapped around the handle and his body cantilevered over the stairwell. "We'll wait for your parents before we barricade the door," he called down to Carity once they had reached the foot of the stairs.

Alex found herself in a basement cafeteria, or at least a reasonable facsimile of one. A dozen people bustled about inside the large room, setting up chairs and folding tables. A grandfatherly man with a cane sat on a carpet remnant, minding a baby and toddler. She tried to fade back toward the edge of the room, where it was less busy.

Carity ran across the room to a tall young man with long dreadlocks who was counting boxes in a corner and making notes on a palm computer. She grabbed his arm, almost knocking the computer from his grasp and started yelling at him and pointing toward the door. He was leading Carity to a chair when the Doctor hurried over, blocking Alex's view.

"You all right?" he asked. Alex nodded. "Well, come on then, work to be done! Stick by me, I don't want to lose you." He studied the room for a moment, then made a beeline for a couple standing by the stairwell.

He interrupted whatever conversation they might have been having to interject, "Hello, I'm the Doctor, just visiting this really interesting planet you've got here. I've been hearing about some technical problems you're having and I wondered if I might make myself useful."

The man turned to the Doctor with an irritated expression. "We have a jet stream inversion likely to hit us in ninety minutes. Winds may hit 200 klicks per hour, and that's if we're not hit by any tornadoes. We do not have time for tourists."

"Seems to me like you need every pair of hands you can get," the Doctor continued smoothly, ratcheting up the charm. She could actually see him shining a little brighter in her mind's eye. She wondered if that was an altogether fair way to behave. "And if you don't mind my asking, why did you have a team out collecting research platforms with a storm like that coming on? With a baby, no less?"

The woman answered him this time. "We couldn't see the storm coming. A solar flare took out our weather and communications satellites, which means no forecasts, no TransMat, and no ability to get a distress signal out. Snow down could start as soon as tomorrow, which means we have to move twenty people, twenty-two with you and your little girl, 2000 klicks sunward in flitters tonight as soon as the weather breaks. If the weather breaks our way."

"And if it doesn't?"

She glanced at Alex and bit off whatever she had been about to say. "The weather had better break our way," she said instead.

"Well," he said, "I can fly a flitter, I can fix almost anything...not while it's in orbit, mind, but anything I can get to, and I have my own ship." He put a heavy emphasis on the last five words.

The door at the top of the stairs banged open. Lila, Van, and Mallena thumped down the stairs covered in half the prairie, followed by the boy who had been holding the door for them. The tall man with the dreadlocks sprinted up the stairs along with a burly woman, both of them carrying large plastic panels.

"Doctor!" Lila shouted, too loudly for the room. She rubbed her ears. "Sorry, it's getting loud out there," she said more quietly. "I'm glad to see you made it here safely." She scanned the room until her eyes lit on Carity, then settled into a more relaxed posture.

She turned to the woman at the foot of the stairs. "Janeane, windspeed's up to 100 kph, and I could see a well formed wall cloud. Is everyone below ground now?"

The woman, Janeane, nodded.

"Did we get the research platforms stowed?" the man at the foot of the stairs asked anxiously.

"Five of nine," Lila replied. "We had to abandon the last four when the wind picked up. Doctor, would you come with me for a moment? The girls are old enough to make themselves useful. I'd like to get them started putting together supper while we discuss the situation in more detail." If that wasn't a transparent attempt to get rid of her and Carity, Alex didn't know what was.

"Oh, absolutely. Come on then, Alex," he said cheerfully, then added to Lila, "My ship will easily accomodate a couple of dozen people, drop you off wherever you like."

"Your ship?" Lila said, a little dubiously.

Carity caught up with them. "We'll all fit, mom," she said. "It's a class four nested manifold with a tesseract integrated into it somehow."

Lila quirked an eyebrow at the Doctor, who confirmed Carity's statement with a nod. The Doctor muttered an aside to Alex, "I think I like it better when they just say it's bigger on the inside."

"That too," Carity said, overhearing them. A bass rumble overhead brought silence to the room. Everyone shared nervous stares for a few heartbeats, then the chatter and bustle resumed. Alex shivered.

"Here we are." Lila opened a door into a small galley, where a pot of chili was bubbling. Cornbread sat cooling in pans on the counter. "You girls make up the plates and bring them out. Nobody is going to want to eat much, but we all need to. Fill the bowls with chili and put a slice of cornbread on the side. There's apple pie to pass out later for dessert. And don't forget to eat something yourselves."

"Okay," Carity said. She started pulling out plates and bowls and setting them on trays. Lila and the Doctor turned to leave.

"I'll fill, you carry," Alex said. She was not about to try carrying hot chili through a gauntlet of milling people, not by a long shot.

"Good idea, Alex, make like an assembly line," the Doctor said as he left them in the galley.

"What do you think they're talking about that they don't want us to hear?" Alex said.

Carity found a knife and started to slice the cornbread into squares. "We should have left last week. Winter's coming early this year, and with the satellites out of commission, we've been moving the whole camp a little bit at a time in flitters. If we don't get out, we're dead."

"But the TARDIS can travel in any kind of weather." At least, Alex couldn't see any reason why a storm would stop it. She found a stool to climb on and started spooning chili into bowls with one of those giant spoons with the long handles. Carity sliced cornbread and tucked one slice onto each plate, under the rim of the bowl. "You can help carry trays out when you're done filling up the bowls," Carity said, bustling back and forth behind Alex to gather silverware and napkins. The room swayed gently in time with her movements, as though Alex were on a boat.

"I shouldn't. I'll spill chili all over the place." It was taking Alex's entire concentration just to fill the bowls neatly, although that may have just been because filling bowls neatly with a spoon that long would be difficult for anybody, especially anybody short enough to have to stand on a stool to reach the soup pot. "I'm really clumsy."

"Be right back," Carity said, leaving with two trays, one in each hand, the showoff.

Alex hurried to finish filling the bowls while she was gone. She didn't want Carity to bump into her and make her tip the scalding pot over both of them. She was about half done when Carity returned for the next pair of trays. "Mom's right, nobody's eating. I'll threaten them some this trip." This time Carity was gone long enough for Alex to finish. She stepped down off the stool and carefully pushed the large, slightly scary pot of hot chili to the back burner.

Carity reappeared to collect the next set of trays. "Come on, you only have to take one if you don't want to do two."

"I really shouldn't." She looked around for another job she could do in the kitchen and came up blank. "I'm not really just clumsy," she admitted, "I have a problem with balancing. I fall down all the time."

"Oh." She looked at the floor for a moment, chewing her lip. "Is that why you walk funny?"

"I walk funny?" Alex felt her cheeks begin to flush. The Doctor had not told her that there was anything obviously wrong with the way she walked.

"I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said that. My mom always says my mouth gets me into trouble." Now Carity was reddening, her embarrassment heightening Alex's own.

Alex looked for something to say to smooth things over. "No, it's okay, its good you told me." She found herself acutely aware of her arm resting on the counter. Would she be doing that if she trusted her sense of balance? Did it look weird? "Walk like me. I want to see," she said.

"Seriously?"

"I promise I won't get mad. Just show me."

"Okay, let me think." She walked into the hallway and shook her body out like an actress getting into a role. Then she took a few steps. Her arms were held out a little from her body, as if she were balancing on a beam, and her feet were spread a little too far apart. The steps were in an odd rhythm, as if she were avoiding invisible obstacles. "It's not quite that weird, really," she said when she turned around and caught Alex's appalled expression.

Lila was hurrying toward Carity, a stern look on her face. "Quick, back inside," Carity said. They backed into the galley. "I better carry out some more trays," Carity said, "You make up the pie plates."

Alex slid pieces of pumpkin pie onto plates and vowed she would never walk again, which was stupid, but she might as well wear a big sign around her neck that said "weirdo". She had thought she could pass for normal. Apparently, she couldn't.

Carity came and went a few more times, until all of the trays were delivered. When she finished, she sprawled on a chair. "My mom thought I was making fun of you. She said I had to apologize to you. So sorry anyway."

Alex waved aside the apology. "I asked you to do it. Did she tell the Doctor?"

Carity gave her a puzzled look. "You call him the Doctor too? Doesn't he have a name?"

"Yes, but he doesn't tell people what it is."

Carity shrugged. "She didn't say anything in front of me, but he and Mom were in a huddle while I was delivering plates. Why, do you think he'll be mad at me?"

Alex walked to the door, obsessing about every step, deliberately keeping her hands at her sides, and almost fell onto Carity. "Sorry." She stuck her head out the door, then stepped into the short hall, looking for the Doctor. "Hey!" she shouted. The Doctor looked up. Alex mimed locking her lips closed and tossing the key over her shoulder. He waved back, cheerily. She treated him to an exasperated eye roll and ducked back into the galley.

Her ears started to feel stuffy. She messed with her shield, but lowering and raising it had no effect. "Are your ears popping?" she asked Carity.

"They have been all afternoon," Carity said.

"That's probably just me," she said without thinking, then added, "What's that noise?" It was a roar with a whistle at its heart, a strange, menacing noise distinct from the wind and rain. The noise built into a shriek. The galley shook. Something crashed into the ceiling and dragged across it with the squeal of a giant's fingernails on a chalkboard. The lights went, plunging the two of them into pitch blackness.

"Get down!" Carity yelled, and dove at Alex. Alex curled herself into a ball and covered her head with her arms like she did in tornado drills back home, Carity curled uncomfortably close beside her. The other girl's fear and her own were drawing them together. Carity was yelling, "I don't want to die, I don't want to die!" over and over, louder than the wind, which was impossible, the noise was too loud to be shouted down. She couldn't hear anything but the wind and Carity screaming in her mind. Alex was dissolving, crashing. She shielded hard and scooted farther down the bench. A couple of plates of pie rattled to the edge of the counter and bounced off their bodies to the floor.

As abruptly as it came upon them, the tornado, if that's what it had been, moved on. They were in total darkness for another couple of beats, then a backup generator hummed and the lights came on, sickly and bluish at half power. Acoustic tiles from the ceiling littered the floor. Carity giggled. It sounded almost like a sob. "You know what this means," she said, once she had recovered her composure.

"What?" Alex was still breathless and a little sick. She picked piecrust out of her hair.

"Pie before dinner." She grinned wickedly and handed her a slice. Alex took it numbly, resting it on her knees. Carity reached over her head. "We got lucky," she said.

Alex looked up. The chili pot had slid forward and was resting with about a quarter of its bottom overhanging the stove's edge. She had been crouched directly beneath it. Carity carefully pushed the pot back to the rear of the stove, then picked up her slice of pie and bit into it. "Eat, really," she prompted. She was smiling, but her face was still pale and her hands shook.

Alex nibbled the tip of her slice. She supposed it was decent pie, but her appetite was nonexistent. There was a knock at the door. Carity moved out of the way. The Doctor poked his head in. "You two all right?"

They both shrugged. Alex set her pie up on the counter and shoved herself to her feet. "Good, I'm good," she said.

"I wasn't making fun of her," Carity said.

"She wasn't, I asked her to show me what I look like," Alex confirmed.

The Doctor pushed the door wide. "We need everyone out in the main room. Now." He let Carity pass them by. "Things have gotten a bit more serious, I'm afraid," he said to Alex. "The TARDIS isn't where we left it."


	3. Chapter 3

Again, thanks to Spring for beta reading.

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The Planet on its Side, Chapter 3

"The TARDIS isn't where we left it," the Doctor said.

"What do you mean?" Alex and the Doctor reached the main room of the shelter. A few tiles had fallen from the ceiling and smashed onto floors and tables in here as well. The tall man with the dreadlocks was calling names and checking them off a list. Mallena was applying ointment and a bandage to the face of the large woman she had seen sealing the door before. The Doctor shushed Alex and leaned up against a wall. Alex sat down in a nearby chair.

"Everyone's accounted for," the tall man said. "Hannes, do we know what hit us?"

The man from the stairwell stood. "It wasn't just the inversion. We were definitely hit with a twister. A good sized one." His words were welcomed with some quiet swearing. "The temperature is still dropping. There is fist sized hail on the ground, but at the moment we have light sleet and a wind speed of about sixty kph. This may be as good as it gets."

The Doctor stepped to the front of the room. "I don't mean to alarm anyone, but my ship is no longer in the hangar. I suggest we check immediately to find out if the twister has damaged any of the flitters."

Hannes pointed to three other people. "Gray, Eleni, Arden, take a look outside. Take the Doctor with you, and be careful, there will be sharp objects all over the place up there. We don't have time for injuries."

"Just one moment," The Doctor said. He crouched by Alex's chair. "I'm not leaving you alone here without discussing your situation with Lila. She's in charge of you until I return. Don't argue, this is a safety issue."

Alex looked nervously around the room. "What if they're not okay with it?"

"Why wouldn't they be?" The Doctor hurried off to speak to Lila, who was standing with her arm around Carity. Alex slumped in her chair and kicked miserably at its legs. She tried to squeeze one little bit of normal into her crazy life and the Doctor had to go and ruin it. Embarrassed and annoyed, she pulled a loop of purple yarn from her pack and stretched it between her fingers, then wove the first couple of movements of a cat's cradle. Her fingers weren't quite as steady as they used to be.

Carity patted her on the shoulder. "Don't do that!" Alex snapped, angry at herself for not paying attention to what was going on around her. "I'm sorry, just don't." The string fell off her fingers into her lap.

"Okay, okay." Carity backed off. "My mum and the Doctor are having some kind of super secret discussion and I'm not invited." She dropped into the chair next to Alex. "It's like they think we don't know how much trouble we're all in. Parents."

Alex sucked on her bottom lip for a moment, then blurted, "He's telling your mom I'm, I guess a telepath. If that's the right word. Repulsive, huh." She wove the yarn through her fingers again as an excuse to not look Carity in the eye. "I didn't want anybody to know."

"Oh." Carity stared down at the floor. "That's kind of creepy."

"Gosh thanks," Alex said, sarcastically. "I feel so much better now."

There was a long, prickly silence. Carity chewed her fingernails, then peered at them to survey the damage. "Can you tell what I'm thinking right now?"

Alex shook the yarn off her uncooperative fingers. "No."

Carity smiled. "Could you spy on the adults?"

"No!"

Carity slumped. "We're all going to die, you know. The Doctor's ship is gone, he said so. We're dead. The snow will get heavier and heavier until the ceiling collapses on us." She stared up at the ceiling, at one of the square holes where a tile had fallen out. "Kind of a gross way to go."

Alex turned to her. She was pretty sure Carity was older than she was, if not by much. She really needed to suck it up. "I've been told I was going to die before," she told her. "I'm not planning on giving up. We'll think of something." She wondered if she could pretend that hope into fact, like pretending a shield. Come on universe, do my bidding, she thought. She felt Lila's approach a few moments before the woman pulled up a chair in front of them.

"You two all right?" she asked.

"No," Carity said. Alex just shrugged.

"Well, you two just stick by me and you'll be fine. We're working on a plan to get us safely out of here." That wasn't a lie, exactly, but it wasn't quite honest either. She felt heavy to Alex, weighed down by worry, maybe even despair.

Alex shook her head to clear it. "The Doctor will come up with something," she told them both.

After all the drama about leaving Alex behind, the Doctor returned with the others in just fifteen minutes. The room went instantly silent. The tall man with the swinging dreadlocks, Gray, she thought his name was, stepped forward. "Bad news, everybody. The flitters are a total loss. Everything above ground is gone." He allowed that fact to sink in for only a second before going on. "The Doctor claims a little windstorm couldn't possibly damage his ship, but the situation doesn't look good."

The Doctor cut in. "My ship is intact and I can track it from here. I'll need a few minutes to get a distance and bearing. You can use that time to get yourselves ready. Wherever it is, we're going to have to get there on foot. Alex, you're with me. Lila, does Carity have an extra set of cold weather gear we could borrow?"

Lila shook her head. "I'm not sure any of us have our cold weather gear. Living quarters are above ground."

"We'll send out a work crew to collect anything usable," Hannes said. "We can dry it down here and outfit everyone as best we can." He started walking from person to person, selecting some to search above ground, others to search the shelter for any emergency gear that might have been stored there. "We should also try to find or jury rig some sleds."

The Doctor nodded. "Good man, Hannes, we'll get everyone out. I promise."

"You just get that location nailed down. I'll find gear for you and your little girl." Hannes returned to organizing everyone else into groups.

"Outfit me last. I can handle the cold better than any of you lot," the Doctor called after him. He led Alex around a corner. "It's nice to work with people not given to panic, for a change," he said. "Now, to find the TARDIS." Alex expected him to pull some tracking device out of his voluminous pockets, but he just crossed his legs and leaned back against the wall for a moment with his eyes unfocused. She had to step back to keep from being drawn into his unshielded brilliance. "Stay here, Alex," he said in a quiet, distracted voice. Then, "There you are, old girl."

He beckoned to Alex. "I'm going to link you to the TARDIS. That way if we get separated, you'll be able to find your way back to her. This would be much easier from inside the ship, but we'll just have to make do." He knelt to cradle her head in his hands while his mind brushed gently, but urgently against her shield.

Alex decided to count the fact that she was only a little tempted to bolt as progress. She thinned her shield out and allowed the Doctor to shift into her mind. A third presence was with them. Alex had an impression of an enormous intelligence, a power greater than the Doctor's, but somehow dependent on him. Be still, they told her. She made herself quiet, as if she were at meeting, still aware of a thrumming undercurrent of fear in her own mind she couldn't quite stifle. Her mind was seized suddenly, her thoughts no longer free to wander among theirs, even her emotions were captured and held fast while that great intelligence matched itself to her, for a moment seemed to become her. For just that second, she felt herself stretched to enormous dimensions, measuring and balancing on lines of probability like a universe spanning game of cat's cradle, then she was released. The Doctor stayed lightly in contact with her, steadying her while she caught her breath.

"Can you feel the link? Should feel like a little tug...might be a line of light for you, you tend to the visual."

She searched, thought she might have found what he was talking about. "Like I'm attached to one end of a laser pointer? Is that the TARDIS?"

"You can follow that line straight to her. If the group gets separated, I want as many of us as possible to be able to find the TARDIS. I'm giving my physical tracking devices to Hannes and Lila. Do you have your key?"

"It's in my bag."

"Good girl." He put his arm around her and started to walk with her back to where the group waited.

Alex leaned on him shamelessly. "But if we get separated and Hannes and Lila get to the TARDIS first, how will they get in?"

"You and I will be able to open the door without a key. I'll give my spare to Hannes, you give your key to Lila."

He pulled her around to face him, gave her a searching look. "That was a tough bit of work there, especially for you. You all right?"

"I think so."

"Go back to the galley and eat something, then put on your spare clothes over the clothes you have on. I kicked your cold tolerance up a notch, but I can't change the laws of thermodynamics." He gave her a little, almost fatherly squeeze and let her go. "I'll catch up with you in a little bit."

Alex helped herself to a couple of slices of pie and a square of cornbread, then pulled on her spare clothes. When she went to find Carity, she remembered that she walked funny and started paying way too much attention to walking normally, which made it paradoxically worse. It didn't help that she was so tired all of a sudden. Carity was hanging out wet and shredded clothes over chairs. "Help me wring these out," Carity said to her. "We've got a dryer, but the less water we have to pull out of them, the faster we can get them dry."

Alex sat down on the floor next to a bucket and picked up a sodden baby snowsuit. She twisted the fabric with hands weaker than she expected them to be. Her eyes drifted closed for a half second, then she jolted back awake.

"You look awful!" Carity said. "What did that Doctor of yours tell you?" She stopped hanging laundry for a moment and sat down by the bucket across from Alex.

"We are not going to die," Alex said firmly. "The TARDIS, that's our ship, is just over a mile, I mean about two kilometers from here. We're going to walk to it before the snow gets too bad." She yawned in spite of herself. "The Doctor can find his ship anywhere. He's kind of linked to it, in his head. I can find her too now, but I just can't stay awake," she mumbled into her own lap. She jerked her head back up. "Carity, get the Doctor. Please."

Alex scooted over to a corner of the room and curled up on the floor. She couldn't fall asleep here. Her shield didn't stay up when she was asleep. There were too many people, she'd be defenseless. She pinched herself viciously on the soft skin just above her elbow. The pain forced her awake again for a few seconds, but she couldn't make herself get up. The last thing she saw before her eyes drifted closed was the Doctor's brown coat brushing the floor in front of where she lay. Safe for the moment, she let herself fall asleep.

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Reviews make us all better. :)


	4. Chapter 4

Thanks to Isis and Spring for beta reading.

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The Planet on its Side, Chapter 4

Alex woke up, still on the floor, with her head resting on the Doctor's leg. He had tucked a corner of his coat around her and was sitting with his back against the wall, legs crossed and sticking straight out in front of him. Little rectangular palmtops lay next to him in a neat pile. She sat up, frankly embarrassed to be dozing in the middle of an emergency. Around her, people were upholstering themselves with layers of pants, shirts, and coats. Carity and a little boy she hadn't noticed before, a child of about six, were ripping paper out of a three ring binder and wadding it up, then tossing the wads onto a pile.

Hannes walked over to the Doctor and Alex. "Having a nice rest, are we?" His voice was casual, but there was an undercurrent of resentment underneath it, as though it was unseemly for the Doctor to be going calmly about his business when there was a crisis evolving.

The Doctor smiled and finished tapping buttons on a palmtop, then set it gently atop the pile. "All finished," he said, standing and brushing his coat into place. He helped Alex to her feet. "These are for you," he added to Hannes, passing him a gunmetal gray disk and a small silver key. "I've programmed the current coordinates of the Tardis into each palmtop, but this device will give you a bit more precision and will correct itself if she moves again. You'll need a key to get in, in case we get separated. You and I, and Lila and Alex will be able to open the doors."

"Perhaps the child's key could be given to one of the adults?" Hannes suggested.

"Not a key. Telepathic recognition circuit. Nontransferrable, I'm afraid. Shall I give you a hand with the sleds?"

Hannes nodded to the Doctor, then turned from him to Alex. "Lila and Carity will help you get dressed. Take that paper and stuff it in between your two layers of pants. There's an extra pair of boots for you. They're a bit big for you, so try to get them on over your shoes if you can." He paused again, surveying the bustling activity in the shelter. "The ice is turning to snow. Wind speed is stable at fifty klicks. We need to be off within the half hour, if we hope find our way out there."

Alex sat down next to Carity and the little boy, and found the pair of snow boots sitting next to the pile of paper. They were only a couple of sizes too big, but her shoes wouldn't quite fit inside. She kicked them off, then pulled on an enormous pair of socks that had been stuffed into the top of one of the boots. With three pairs of socks on, the boots might just fit. She smoothed out her socks to make sure she wouldn't be walking on wrinkles, then pulled on the boots, taking the time to fasten them securely and make sure her pants bottoms were tucked inside. "Snows a lot where I come from, too," she remarked to Carity. "Not this much, of course." She stood up to stomp in the boots, then reached for a handful of wadded paper."

"Where's that?" Carity asked. Her bottom half was puffed out with paper already. She was busy putting layer after layer of socks on the little boy's feet.

"Kenosha, Wisconsin," At Carity's blank look, she clarified, "Earth."

"You're from Old Earth?"

"I told you I'm from way uptime. I'm from before humans had colonies on other worlds." Stuff, stuff, stomp, stomp. She gathered her shoes and tucked them into her backpack.

"You are ancient!" Carity said, sounding suitably impressed for a change. "What's it like?" She stood the little boy up and pulled a large sweatshirt over his head. He stood patiently while she rolled the sleeves up until his fingers poked out.

With wads of paper down her pants, Alex walked even more awkwardly than usual. At least everyone else would be walking like snowmen, too. "We've only been to the moon. Aliens come by sometimes, but people aren't sure whether they're real or not."

Lila bustled over with a bundle. "I found coats for each of you in the emergency supply kit." She stuffed the little boy into his coat first, using a belt to tie it up so he wouldn't trip on it, then helped Carity on with hers and handed her gloves and a hat. "Alex, can you get into this yourself?"

"Yeah." She caught the coat as it was tossed to her and put it on, then took it back off, rolled up the sleeves, zipped it up halfway, and stepped back into it. It was huge, but the modifications made it wearable. She pulled on her hat. She had a little trouble when it came to getting the backpack on over the bulky coat.

"I'll take it for you," Carity said, putting it on and cinching up the straps. "Oh, it's not heavy at all!"

"It's got one of those manifold thingies in it," Alex explained.

"Cool."

They made their way to the stairs, where everyone was gathering as soon as they had dressed. Hannes stood on the second step so everyone could see him. "It's too dangerous to tie ourselves together. If one person falls, he could bring down the whole group, but we are all going to stay together," he said. "Each of you has the coordinates to the Doctor's ship on your palmtops, but we can't trust the ground based tracking beacons to survive much longer, so don't count on them and get careless. The Doctor will be in front. Lila, you will be with the little girl, Alex, at the rear. We've got the babies strapped to their mothers. Denny will have to ride on the sled, he's too big to carry and too small to walk. That makes six groups of three. Carity, Alex, and Remy should have an adult on each side. Keep track of your neighbors on each side, in front and in back."

The Doctor took Hannes' place. "My ship looks like a blue wooden rectangular prism approximately one point five meters square in footprint and a little more than two meters in height. Why is not important, it just does." He paused, rubbing his hands together. They had managed to convince him to button his coat and put on a hat, but he had made no other concessions to the cold. "Think of this as an adventure. Allons y!" He bolted up the stairs and threw the door open.

Alex had to wait at the bottom of the stairs until everyone had filed out of the building. The door they had gone in by was gone, replaced by a flat rectangle of twilight. She followed Lila up and out. Van pulled out a sturdy flashlight and flicked it on. A neat line of people walking three abreast trailed away in the direction of the TARDIS, their hats and shoulders already dusted with snow. Fat white flakes spun and dipped in the flashlight beams, so thick it was difficult to see more than a few feet in front of her. She stood, flanked by Lila and Van, on a small plateau amid the dips and swells of open prairie strewn with a few angular shapes poking out of the handsbreadth of snow already on the ground. The buildings were entirely gone. They took their place at the back of the line, Alex expecting to hear their footsteps crunching as they walked, but all sound was muffled, swallowed up in the snow. Even the wind whipping at the bare skin of her cheeks was all but soundless.

This wasn't going to be so bad, she thought. They had to keep their heads down, both because of the wind and because of the chance of stepping on debris, but the ground was fairly level. The line of people stretched out before her like bobbing lanterns in twilight. The going was slow, but at this rate it would only be an hour until they reached the TARDIS, maybe a little more. The head of the line, sensed more than seen, dropped out of sight one row at a time in front of her.

She skidded down the steep slope at the edge of the plateau, waving off help from Van with her coat covered arms. The sleeves had unrolled, leaving her hands buried six inches inside the coat sleeves, but it was warmer that way anyway, and it didn't really matter if she looked like a penguin. The wind picked up again, slicing through layers of pants and paper. She resisted the urge to crouch down in the snow and fought her way forward. The line stretched out more now, it's front end visible only as a shining patch in the distance. They stopped moving forward. She stood stiff in the wind, waiting for everyone to start moving again.

"You doing all right, squeak?" Van said. The snow on his eyebrows made him look like an old man.

"I'm fine," Alex said. "Can you see?"

"Not much," Van admitted. "I'm just following the backs right in front of me."

"I'm following the Doctor. Can you see him way up there?" She pointed in his direction.

Lila answered her. "Alex, I can barely see the people right in front of us."

"Close your eyes and try. He's shining brighter than I've ever seen him, like a light house. I think he wants to be seen."

"I'm sorry, honey, I wouldn't even know how to look." Lila patted her on the back of her heavy coat once, then snatched her hand back. "We'll just have to follow you. You should be keeping track of where the ship is, not just following the Doctor."

"Head count!" came a shout from ahead of them. They each shouted their names, then the line began, slowly, to move again.

Alex took a moment to close her eyes and feel, or look, for the line that connected her to the Tardis. There it was, a glowing strand, straight as a laser beam. She felt her way forward in the deepening blue gloom, putting one foot forward, testing the footing for holes and loose snow, planting the foot, stepping with the next. She'd become so used to not trusting her footing that alone among Lila and Van beside her, and Gray, Mallena, and Carity just ahead of them, she had not yet fallen. Flashlights bobbed at waist height, illuminating flickering hordes of snowflakes. Mindlight sparkled a little higher, like candlelight refracting through crystal. The warmth seeped out of her clothes.

The wind shifted. The snow became, impossibly, heavier. Alex was caught by a gust that threw her off balance and into Lila. They tumbled together down a steep incline, Alex having to shield hard enough she lost track of the TARDIS, and hung up in a clump of snow covered brush. Lila said something, but Alex couldn't hear her over the sudden howling. She clapped her hands to her ears and shook her head. Lila tried to stand, but crouched back down by where Alex lay in a small hollow, wrapping her arms over her head. "Stay down!" she yelled, this time just audibly over the roar of the wind. Tornadoes were impossible in air this cold, Alex thought, at least, she hoped they were. She curled into as tight a ball as she could to wait out the sudden squall, taking advantage of her inactivity to pick up the TARDIS's thread again and try to find the Doctor, still far ahead and also unmoving.

Alex lay balled up next to Lila in their tiny shelter for ages, not daring to check her watch because it would mean pulling her hand out of the protection of her long coat sleeve. The thread in her mind strained and twisted suddenly, settling after several long seconds in a different location than it had been in before. It hadn't moved much, maybe a few meters, as if it had fallen into a kettle hole, but it would be enough to cause anyone relying only on the coordinates programmed into a palmtop to miss it entirely. She cast around her, counting heads, and could find only six or eight, not counting the Doctor. She and Lila had two of only four reliable ways of finding the TARDIS. That was, if the squall died down before they were all buried.

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	5. Chapter 5

Alex had thought she was cold before. The hollow in which she and Lila lay was formed from a slight overhang of earth near the bottom of a kettle hole, buttressed by stiff shrubs that had not yet succumbed to the weight of the snow. Lila lay so that her body shielded Alex from the bulk of the wind, but fingers of it licked into the shelter to freeze her cheeks and patches on her legs that had become wet from close contact with the ground.

When the wind died down enough to make standing possible, Lila pulled free of the ground and took out her flashlight. She swung its beam around in the darkness, aiming toward faint shouts from nearby. Alex tried to move, but the melted snow under her body had refrozen into a veneer of ice. She couldn't get enough leverage to free herself. Lila hauled her up by her coat, snapping the thin layer of ice welding her clothes to the ground. The wind licked at her wet pants like a knife, doubling her over. She pressed her lips together hard and stomped until she could trust her legs to hold her. Almost too cold to shiver, she pulled her arms out of her sleeves and let them flap empty while she wrapped her arms around her body. "Alex, we need to get everyone back together!" Lila shouted, snapping Alex out of her self-absorbed misery. "Look around. Do you see anybody?"

Alex didn't bother looking with her eyes, useless as they were in the storm. "Four," she said, pointing out a pair near the top of the ravine, then in the opposite direction where another pair had just begun to move.

Lila nodded. "I see those two, I think. The other two...I don't see anything up where you're pointing. I think we should split up for a second, before the others get too far away. You catch those two up there. I'm going after the ones I can see. We'll meet back here." The faint shadow of her outline moved off into the darkness, flashlight swinging. Alex shouted uphill. "Hey, who's up there?"

Her voice was carried away by the howling wind. She didn't know if they had heard her. She stuck her arms back into her sleeves and climbed up to the two of them, wanting to catch them before they moved beyond her ability to find them. They grabbed her as she reached the top of the kettle hole and she had to struggle to extricate herself.

"Carity, that you?" Gray shouted.

"It's Alex. Lila's trying to get everybody back together. Don't those little palmtops have phones or coms or something?

"Gray and Brinna," Gray said. "They do, but they won't work in this weather. Too much electrical interference, given that we don't have the satellites to boost the signal."

Brinna turned in a circle, one gloved hand shielding her eyes. "I don't see anyone else. Shall we keep moving forward and try to gather our people as we go?"

"Just a second," Alex said. She hunkered down into her coat and squeezed her eyes shut. Lila was out of range. She, Gray and Brinna could have been the only people in the whole world, except for the Doctor, who still bobbed along ahead of them. "Lila said she was coming back for me. Should we wait for her?"

"We can wait for a few minutes," Gray said. Alex waited again, for what seemed like a very long time. It was too cold to stand completely still, so she stomped in a little circle. Visibility was getting worse again. Gray pulled off one glove with his teeth and stuck it under his arm. He pulled the palmtop out of his pocket and stabbed at it with red fingers. "We've lost our locator signal from the ground based transmitters. We can't tell where we are anymore."

"Lila has one of the Doctor's trackers. She'll still be able to find the TARDIS," Alex said.

"And you have one too, right, Alex?" Brinna squinted into gray haze. "We can't wait any longer. Lila can manage."

"The TARDIS is that way," Alex pointed with one of her flapping, empty sleeves and started walking again, too cold to keep still any longer. She didn't bother to look up again. They picked their way over the uneven ground, feet sinking into snow up to their calves. Her nose and the wet skin of her left leg burned more and more until they went mercifully, if ominously numb. She pulled her arms back out of her sleeves again to tuck her fingers into her armpits. The world narrowed to the constant trace of the TARDIS, lighting her way and drawing her forward, the two shimmering shapes of Gray and Brinna, and the absorbing calculus of shoving one booted foot into ever deepening snow, wriggling it to be sure of her footing, shifting her weight, and repeating with the other foot. Every twenty steps they paused, Gray and Brinna to look for flashlight beams, Alex to check the perimeter of her range for anyone they might be able to gather along with them. Brinna thought she saw someone once, so they trudged off in that direction for several minutes, but they never caught sight of him or her again and eventually turned back in the direction of the TARDIS.

She didn't see the TARDIS until she was almost upon it. She knew she was close just by the strength of the signal, but her need to make herself keep going had caused her to lie to herself over and over that it was twenty more steps, just twenty more steps, so that when it really was just twenty more steps, she didn't believe herself. She was so focused on putting one leaden foot in front of the other that only the sudden break in the wind as they reached the bottom of a gully broke her concentration. There sat the TARDIS, right in front of her, only a little tilted on the uneven ground.

Gray reached up with one long arm and leaned against the ship with a triumphant gesture like that of a mountain climber having reached the summit, but Alex thought he was also wanting to touch her, to assure himself she was real. Brinna collapsed to the ground at their feet. Alex stood in front of the doors. She had never even opened the door with her key, much less tried to ask the ship to let her in without one. Pretending competence she didn't quite feel, she worked one numb hand out of her sleeve and rested it flat against the not as cold as it ought to be, faintly humming keyhole. She lowered her shield, in case it was necessary. Her head floated for a fraction of a second, brushed gently by that enormous power, then there was an anticlimactic mechanical click, and the door swung inward. She shook snow off herself and pushed her way inside.

It was warm, ridiculously warm and golden and beautiful. Gray pulled Brinna to her feet and hauled her inside. Janeane bustled over to them, dressed in a thick bathrobe and woolly orange socks, and started pulling off her wet clothes. Alex shooed her away, but found she couldn't make her frozen fingers work any of the fasteners, so she ended up standing on the floor grating, dripping and shivering as ice and snow melted off of her clothes while Janeane gently undressed Brinna. Another woman sat with her back to the console, swaddled in blankets, a thermos of tea on the grating beside her. She could see the curve of a baby's head just under the lip of the blanket, resting against the woman's chest.

The Doctor walked into the control room, scrubbing at his hair. He was dressed in dry clothes with a different, more battered long coat over them, topped off with a long multicolored scarf. Beside him, another man outfitted in clean, dry cold weather gear and carrying a bright red over the shoulder bag jogged into the room, snagged a thermos of tea, and took a long drink. "Looks like we have eight so far," the man in the cold weather gear said to the Doctor.

The Doctor nodded, all business. "Good. Now it's possible some people managed to make it to the spot where the TARDIS was before it rolled down this slope, so we'll check there first." He rushed over to Alex, relief plain on his face, and started pulling off sodden layers until Alex was standing in the middle of the TARDIS in her underpants, too grateful of the warmed air around her to be ashamed. She would have been more embarrassed if Gray and Brinna hadn't also been stripped and wrapped in blankets moments before. He pulled a big fleece blanketlike thing over her head. It was warmer than it had any right to be, despite not having any network of wires or other trappings of the electric blankets she was familiar with. She worked her arms into the sleeves. The Doctor held her by the shoulders. "Alex, who did you see out there?" The Doctor asked. "Where were you when you were separated?"

"Would it be faster to show you?" she asked. At his surprised nod, she pushed the memory to the front of her mind and he caught it, seemed to peruse it for a moment, then gave her a little half-hug and a thermos of tea and was out the door.

And now they were six. Janeane, Gray, Brinna, Alex, and the lady with the baby. Alex sipped her tea. Her frostbitten face and legs were starting to throb in earnest. They all sat in a half circle facing the outer doors, waiting for them to open. Janeane walked over and knelt by the woman with the baby. "Nia, may I take the baby's temperature?"

The woman, Nia, folded back the blanket. Janeane waved something over the baby. "That looks better," she said. She sat back down next to Nia and the baby. They watched the door.

There was a little snick, and the door swung open. Lila staggered in with a man who wasn't Van by her side. She stood for a moment, taking in each of their faces. "Is that everybody?"

Janeane said gently, "Arden and the Doctor just headed back out to look for stragglers."

Lila crumpled to the floor and started to sob. Gray and Janeane hurried toward her and her companion, stripping them down. Alex made her way over to the pile of warming blankets, took the top two off the pile, and brought them over. "Thanks," Janeane said.

"I couldn't find them," Lila cried. "I looked as long as I could, but I never saw them." Alex stood next to Janeane and the exhausted Lila, feeling useless and overwhelmed. Lila's despair washed over her in waves. There was nothing she could say or do to make it better, but she couldn't just walk away. Lila's whole family were out there, Carity with them, freezing to death, and there was nothing she could do about it. "Let me go back out." Lila struggled in Janeane's arms.

"I'm sorry," Janeane said. She reached into a bag and pulled out a device that looked a bit like the Doctor's screwdriver. She slotted a little red ampule into it, then pressed the device against the woman's throat. Lila sagged into her arms. Janeane arranged her as comfortably as she could on the floor, then turned back to face the door again.

Alex wrapped her blankets tighter around herself and settled in to wait for the Doctor to return. She knew he was alive, but she couldn't quite figure out how far away he was through the TARDIS's interference. After about fifteen minutes, the door swung inward again. The Doctor entered first, a large bundle in his arms. He strode straight past everyone and out the door that led to the rest of the ship. Arden stood in the middle of the control room. "We found bodies," he said.

Alex didn't wait to hear names. She followed the Doctor into the infirmary, where he was unwrapping the little boy, Denny, and settling him into a bed. Denny was whimpering, which Alex supposed was a better sign than silence. "I'm going to put you on this bed to get you warmed up," he told the child, sliding him onto a bed recessed into the wall and fiddling with some dials beside it. A golden light poured down over Denny where he lay. The Doctor gave him a shot of something, too, and he closed his eyes. "He's pretty badly frostbitten. He'll be better off sleeping until the TARDIS has had some time to work on him."

"That man said you found bodies. Was Carity one of them?" Alex asked.

"No," he said, but his face was grim. "Hannes and a couple of people with him fell into one of the ponds. But Alex, it doesn't look good. The ground trackers aren't working and we're nearly invisible in this whiteout. There are about 40 centimeters of snow on the ground. No one else is coming." He sat down beside Denny's bed and best his head in exhaustion.

Alex grabbed at his coat. "Then we have to go back out and look!" she demanded. She counted in her head. "There were twenty two of us. Eleven are here, three are dead, that leaves eight more people still out there. We can't just leave them!"

He dropped into a chair beside her. "Alex, I'm not going to be able to find anybody out there."

"But can't you see them? I mean, can't you sense them out there?"

"I'm sorry, Alex." The look on his face told her already. No. He wasn't even going to try. She balled her hands into fists and punched at his chest futilely. He caught her hands and held them still in his. "Our abilities, yours and mine, aren't identical. I can perceive the broad sweep of time and how each life fits into that sweep, but my connection to other minds, though in some ways more powerful than yours, isn't as precise. I can't orient on someone more than a few meters away, not accurately enough to find them quickly."

"Then let me go," Alex sobbed, collapsing into his arms, tears starting to flow down her cheeks. She remembered Carity curled up on a folding chair, so sure she was going to die. Alex had promised it would be okay, that the Doctor would think of something. She remembered them getting ready to go, trying to pretend they were on a grand adventure. She remembered Carity strapping on Alex's purple backpack. "Carity has my backpack," she said.

"I don't understand," the Doctor said.

Alex sat up. "Carity has my backpack. She was carrying it for me. You can track it with your sonic thing."

The Doctor leapt to his feet so fast he almost knocked Alex over. "I will be back. Stay here. Watch Denny."

She stayed while Denny drifted off to sleep in his cocoon of light. It looked like he was lying in a giant microwave. Janeane came in a few minutes later. "You know how this thing works?" she asked Alex.

Alex shrugged. "I'm just supposed to watch it, not touch it, but the TARDIS is smart enough to monitor him. The Doctor's gone out one more time. There's a tracking device in the bag Carity was wearing. He's gone to look for her and anyone who might be with her."

"I know, he told me. Don't get your hopes up. It's getting colder all the time, and the snow's getting deeper." She started to rummage through cupboards, looking for Alex wasn't sure what. "Alex. There's a chance the Doctor won't make it back. It's really getting bad out there. If he doesn't, do you know how to operate the ship?"

Alex shook her head. "If he doesn't come back, the ship will wait for as long as he's told it to wait, then it will take me home. I'm sorry, my home isn't probably somewhere you'll want to go."

"Where is home, for you?"

"Old Earth, early 21st century. Not much space travel or anything. You'd be stuck on Earth."

"That where your Dad's from, too? Funny place to find a timeship." She bent down to rummage through some lower cabinets. "I can't figure out where anything is in here. Kind of odd that its all labeled in galactic standard, though."

"It's not labeled in galactic standard, the ship translates for you, and he's not my Dad. I'm just traveling with him for a while. He doesn't like to talk about where he's from." She rubbed absently at her nose. The sudden shock of pain startled her so badly that she doubled over to bury her face in her lap, tears pricking suddenly under her eyelids.

"What is it?" Janeane asked, concern in her voice.

"I forgot about the frostbite." She sat back up, careful this time to dab, not wipe her stinging tears off her face. "I can't feel my nose, but the rest of my face really hurts. My legs are pretty bad, too, where they got wet." She pulled up her blanket to expose her raw calves, red blotched with white.

Janeane took as close a look as she could without touching her. She hissed in sympathy. "Most of the spots are red. That's good, it means the blood is flowing. I don't like the look of that nose, though. Oh, don't worry," she added, "It will heal, faster if I can find the tissue regenerating equipment in this infirmary. Just don't rub it."

She rummaged in her own emergency kit. "Here, for the pain." She set a pill on the table. "It just a mild analgesic, won't make you sleepy or anything."

Alex took the pill, but it didn't make her heart beat any more slowly or the tightness in her stomach go away. She left Janeane in the infirmary with Denny and returned to the control room. Lila sat on the floor in front of the door, awake again. Her eyes never left it. Alex sat down beside her to wait, willing to give her own waiting the semblance of calm, trusting expectation rather than anxious restlessness. "He's still alive," she said to the room at large.

The Doctor burst through the door so caked with snow she couldn't have recognized him by sight, a Carity sized bundle in his arms. Gray's long, lean frame followed close behind, half carrying, half dragging another snow caked figure. Alex hadn't even noticed that Gray had gone. Lila stumbled after them, trailing blankets.

Alex realized halfway to the infirmary that the most help she could be would be to absent herself, even though the thing she wanted most at that moment was to be with them, making herself useful and, if she were truly honest with herself, learning how to use every medical device in the place. She supposed that she was just going to have to get accustomed to stethoscope envy, since there was no way on Earth or in space she was going to be a real doctor now. Twenty minutes. She'd give them twenty minutes to get everything organized, and then she'd peek in the door.

Twenty minutes is a very long time. Alex made it to ten minutes by reading the same page of Redwall over and over again, unable to make the words stick in her head. She memorized her page number before closing the book and tucking it under her pillow, then she crept up to the infirmary door. The Doctor and Janeane had gotten Carity and it looked like Mallena and her baby stripped down and tucked into the beds with the golden lamps. All four beds were filled now. Lila was sitting between her daughters, nodding on her chair, unable to fight off the effects of the sedative Janeane had given her any longer. Janeane and the Doctor were talking in low voices at the opposite end of the room.

"Lila?" she said. Lila looked up at her. She could feel the woman's sorrow like a weight, pressing her into the floor. "Van's gone," she said. "Van's gone, but I have my girls. Thank you for that." Her voice was flattened, her eyes desolate. Alex had seen the look before. Her mother had looked at her that way when she thought Alex wasn't looking, before she'd had to go away with the Doctor.

"You should get some rest," Alex said. "My room's right across the hall. You can use my bed."

Lila didn't respond. Alex chewed her lip, unsure what to say or do. Lila's head drooped again. The Doctor and Janeane were still talking at the back of the infirmary. Alex walked up to them, deliberately loudly, so they wouldn't think she was eavesdropping. "Doctor?"

They both turned to her. The Doctor winced. "Let's get to work on that frostbite, shall we?" he said.

"Lila's going to fall asleep in her chair," Alex said. "She can have my room, but I can't get her there."

Janeane looked past Alex to where Lila sat. "I'll take care of her." She swept past Alex to where Lila sat, put an arm around Lila's shoulders and walked her out of the infirmary.

The Doctor picked her up and plunked her on a small exam table, then handed her a tube of bluish cream. "Put that on your face. I'll do your legs."

"I came in to see if there was anything useful I could do," Alex said, impatient with being taken care of, again. "I know I'm not really pulling my weight around here."

The Doctor shook his head. "Alex. If I had come here alone, there would have been seven survivors, not counting me. With you here, it was twelve, not counting us. I think you're pulling plenty." He bent down to swipe cool blue stuff onto her legs up to the knees.

"You don't know that for sure," she said, feeling sulky and defeated.

"Actually, I do. Time Lord, remember?" He took a seat opposite her. "I wish there were twenty-two people in here drinking up all my tea as much as you do, but that's one lesson you have to learn. We do what we can, with what we have, when we get the chance. That's all anyone can do."

Alex put down her tube of blue magic frostbite cream. "Have you looked at my future?"

The Doctor shrugged. "Futures, to be precise," he said. "I try not to look too closely at the futures of the people I travel with. It complicates things too much."

"You didn't say no." She was getting good at noticing when the Doctor answered the edges of questions and avoided their centers.

"You're getting too smart for me."

She took a deep breath, looked around the filled infirmary, then said. "You know why I want to get home a few minutes after I left, right?"

"You told me you were worried about your parents getting in trouble if you didn't come home."

Again, that was only half an answer. "A disease doesn't get a name if only one person has it," she said, half sure he already knew . "I know helping the other kids with disintegrative synesthesia is going to be my job when I get home. I don't even know how to start. It's too big for me."

"You'll grow into it. She knows." He swept a wide gesture encompassing the room. "She's smarter that even I give her credit for, sometimes, and she reads time better than I do. I've learned to trust her judgement. She wanted us together or she would never have let you anywhere near her."

"She's not very nice," Alex said, regarding her frostbitten legs.

"What do you mean, not very nice!" She jumped at his harsh tone, but realized almost immediately that he was joking.

She explained with a question. "Does something bad happen every time you go somewhere?"

"No," he said. He studied the opened, half empty cabinets in the infirmary for a moment, then corrected himself. "Well, yeah, most of the time. Sometimes it's not really awful though, just something that needs fixing. Sometimes I think she has a 'to do' list somewhere in those old circuits. The fact that you're on it must mean something."

What, exactly? Alex wondered, not comforted at all. She was beginning to think that maybe she had two tutors, not just one, and that the TARDIS was going to be the far harsher taskmaster.


End file.
